Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not Like Your Brain—Yet

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Why Artificial Intelligence Is Not Like Your Brain—Yet

Zohar Lazar

Here’s a fun drinking game: Every time someone compares AI to the human brain, take a shot. It’ll dull the pain of such mindless metaphorizing—and serve as a reminder that you, an at-least-semiconscious being, have an actual brain that can make real decisions like “Drink!” in the first place. Contra the hype of marketers (as regurgitated by credulous journalists—for shame!), AI resembles the gray matter in your head about as much as a pull-string doll resembles a rocket scientist. There’s a similarity in shape, ish: So-called neural networks are software programs inspired by neuroscience. But these systems have only a few million “neurons,” which are really just nodes with some input/output connections.

That’s puny compared to the 100 billion genuine neurons in your cranium. Read it and weep, Alexa! We’re talking 100 trillion synapses. Or 200 trillion. (Of course, cognition is still pretty incognita itself—which means we’re “modeling” AIs on something we barely even comprehend.) The truth is, tricks like beating people at Go or diagnosing melanomas owe more to brute-force computing power than to any higher sentience. It’s just basic pattern matching under the hood. Yes, a “deep learning” system running on 16,000 processors taught itself to identify cats—with 75 percent accuracy—after analyzing 10 million images. A toddler can nail that on a walk to the playground. So all this Muskian/Hawkingian/Singularitarian talk of “summoning the demon” and “existential threats” to our “survival”? Eh, let’s just worry about that tomorrow. For now, we’re human, and we’re here to drink.